22/09/2015

Britain's cyber intelligence agency, the GCHQ, has released new guidance suggesting people should avoid complex passwords for their online accounts. They claim that using a strong password doesn't make your accounts harder to hack.

Does anyone else think it's because they're sick of having to work hard to read our emails these days?

Since Edward Snowden and all the scandal about government agencies reading what we do online people will have been trying to make their passwords harder to crack, and that means more work for GCHQ. If they can somehow talk us into having our passwords as "password1" they'd free up a lot of time.

As a side note, my password isn't password1, so don't try. But my safeword is "password1". It used to be "Password1" but sometimes you can't convey that capital letter at the start. Well, not when you have someone sat on your face you can't.

In their new password guidelines, GCHQ spy chiefs claim complex passwords fail to deter cyber hackers and indeed such behaviour can be detrimental to cyber safety, as the impossibility of remembering all passwords forces users to create exceptionally obvious passwords, such as '123456'.

Oooh, hang on. New safeword there.

Ciaran Martin, the director general for GCHQ, said: 'Complex passwords do not usually frustrate attackers, yet they make daily life much harder for users.'

I remember when the advice was to use the first letters of the words in a sentence. And to make it even harder to guess I would pick a sentence you would never hear someone say, like, "Oh good, I'm sat near a baby on this flight." Or, "Hello tailor, please give me a suit like Jeremy Corbyn's."

They have a point though. Every website requires a password, and if you made a secure one for each site that would be lots to remember. But if it's something important, something you need to keep private, it's worth using a good password. That's why I came up with a really strong password for my Ashley Madison account. I'm sure that's safe.